A Bright and Terrible Sword Page 17

  I stared incredulously as she fingered her plain, soiled gown. Nothing to wear? But she was a child, and a girl, and the only girl children I had known were Stephanie, always garbed as a princess by hands other than her own, and Katharine, who had been mad. If I could have been said to ‘know’ Katharine at all. Nothing to wear?

  ‘Well, it matters not,’ Rawnie finally pronounced, getting to her feet. ‘I daresay some of your soldier friends have wives who can clothe me properly. Only we must hurry, you know. Court is probably a fair walk from here.’

  It was at least two weeks’ walk, perhaps three, for a child. My heart shrivelled. My plan – if it even deserved that name – was stupid. By the time we reached Glory, my body back in Galtryf would have died from lack of food and water, and so I would die, too. Never had I left myself in trance to cross over for more than a few days. Perhaps I, running as a moor cur, could make it to Glory in that time. But Rawnie could not.

  But once more I had underestimated her. ‘Come on, Roger,’ she said, hoisting her little pack. ‘We need to reach some farmhouse or village where I can steal a horse.’

  She found one by early afternoon, following the smoke that drifted high above the moor from a chimney. We had travelled northwest, away from Galtryf and towards the Unclaimed Lands, and had seen no one. No one was looking for us. The Brotherhood would be searching for me in the Country of the Dead. If Leo knew yet that Rawnie was missing and not merely hiding somewhere within the keep, he would probably assume her dead on the moor, prey to the same mad pack of rabid moor curs that had killed Katharine.

  ‘You stay here,’ Rawnie told me, from the cover of a low tor. ‘If that horse scents you, it will probably neigh or bolt or skies-know-what. I can do this.’

  I shook my head, the gesture still feeling as unnatural as it had yesterday.

  ‘Yes, I can,’ she said irritably. ‘Nobody ever thinks I can do anything! But Papa taught me all about horses.’

  Nobody had taught her about tracking. She was no Jee, who was her age but who had grown up in the Unclaimed Lands and could move through woods and fields so stealthily that he was barely glimpsed. Rawnie crouched, but anyone glancing from the window of the small hut would have seen her barrelling across the open space to the barn. No one glanced. In fact, I could scent no trace of man, despite that smoke, and all at once my ears flattened and my hackles rose. The hut was surrounded by no fields, no sheep pens, no byres. It was not a farmstead but a way station, maintained for travellers who needed a bed, a meal, and a change of fast horse. The only such people I could imagine on this desolate moor were those engaged in the hidden war of Soulvine and the Brotherhood against my father’s hisafs.

  I almost sprinted after Rawnie. Someone was in that hut or there would not be smoke drifting above it. What if they had dogs? But Rawnie was right: any closer and I would scare the horse whose scent twitched in my nostrils. Taut with indecision, I watched her unlatch the barn door and slip inside.

  A minute passed. Two. Five. Did the smoke burn thicker, as if someone inside and awake had thrown more peat on the fire? No, it was only my fear misjudging the smoke. Come, Rawnie, come back—

  She did, bursting from the barn on a huge brown charger, looking small in the saddle. The horse’s hoofs thudded on the ground. ‘Go!’ Rawnie screamed at me, even as the charger shied away from me and the hut door burst open. Rawnie kept her seat as the horse thundered past me. I heard the crack of a gun, accompanied by shouts I couldn’t distinguish. Then we were racing across the moor.

  When she finally pulled up her mount, Rawnie’s face shone with triumph. She laughed aloud, while the horse pawed the ground and rolled its eyes at me. ‘We did it!’ Rawnie cried. Her teeth flashed in laughter; her straggling braids danced. She easily held the horse in check; evidently our father had taught her well.

  He had never taught me anything at all.

  When she was done laughing and gloating, Rawnie leaned down to me from the saddle. ‘Which way, Roger? Which way to court?’

  Sullenly I trotted off, leading the way northwest, towards The Queendom. Away from Maggie, trapped at Galtryf Keep.

  18

  By evening we reached the border between Soulvine Moor and the Unclaimed Lands. After this, progress would be slower as we left the open moor and took the rough tracks down through the mountains. Rawnie slid from her saddle. Her mood had changed, from elation to weariness and fear. How much did she know about making camp? I could not even ask her.

  At least she could make a fire. ‘I have only a little cheese left, Roger,’ she told me petulantly, ‘so you can’t have any. And what am I supposed to eat when that’s gone?’

  I thought of Jee, her age, but able to snare game and find edible plants. I thought of Tom Jenkins, the best woodland tracker I had ever seen. I thought of Fia and Maggie, both competent women able to care for themselves and everyone else. But Rawnie was not a woman; she was a spoiled child about to cry, or rage, or both. How was I going to feed her?

  ‘My legs hurt,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to riding any more!’

  Nor I to being a moor cur.

  ‘And you’re no help,’ she said spitefully. ‘If I didn’t need you to bring back an army for Mama, I’d just get on my horse and leave you, Roger Kilbourne!’

  At that moment, I wanted her to.

  ‘Where are you going? Don’t leave me, you piss-pot!’

  I trotted back and lay beside her, resentful and miserable. Rawnie knotted her hand in my neck fur. Within three minutes she was asleep by the dying fire.

  I trotted past the horse, tied to a tree and hungrily cropping whatever grass it could find. During the long day’s ride it had grown more accustomed to me. A half mile away, I shifted from Roger to the moor cur, hunted and ate, and returned to Rawnie. When I slept, I again dreamed of Princess Stephanie, this dream marginally less murky than the last: ‘Where do they go?’

  I didn’t know. Not where, not who, not anything.

  The second day we crossed the entire Unclaimed Lands, Rawnie on that superb, tireless horse. She raced past the few travellers we encountered before they could question her. I kept pace, hidden in the woods. With daylight both Rawnie’s hunger and her natural toughness had returned. She ate some wild berries and a few nuts, but by evening she was ravenous. And at evening we crossed into The Queendom and came to our first farming village.

  ‘You stay here,’ she said to me. ‘You’ll be no good to me in this place, Roger. Watch my horse.’

  What?

  She tied the horse to a tree within a grove by the small river that ran through town. I danced around her, frustrated beyond belief by my inability to tell her anything. Or, short of biting her, to keep her from doing anything. With a last contemptuous glance, Rawnie left me and walked towards the village. She knocked on the first door she came to, a prosperous looking cottage with thatched roof, dormer windows, roses and hollyhocks growing by the well tended path. A woman opened the door, stout and middle-aged. I could not hear what was being said. But after a few moments the woman grabbed Rawnie, pulled her inside, and closed the door.

  What had Rawnie told her? I could guess. A lost or abandoned child, hungry and dirty, looking piteous … perhaps the little liar said she’d run away from a wicked uncle, or been abducted by bandits, or whatever else that fertile brain could concoct. She would have widened her eyes and squeezed out a few tears. Probably right now Rawnie sat in a warm kitchen cosy with firelight, gorging on ham and preserves and fresh bread. Why had I assumed that Jee’s and Maggie’s way of caring for oneself was the only way?

  Maggie. Our son. Both were a constant pounding in my mind, like the drumbeat during battle. And all I could do was skulk here in the shadows, as mired in being a moor cur as once I had been mired in being a fool.

  Sometime before morning, a sharp scent brought me from my fitful sleep.

  A man appeared on the road, not twenty feet from my hiding place. One moment he was not there, and the next he was. A hisaf crossing b
ack over.

  And then another. And another. And one more. Their smell filled my nostrils.

  Had they come for Rawnie? But the four, not talking, walked briskly away from the outlying cottage and towards the cluster of those around the village green. Each chose a different dwelling, stood by the barred kitchen door, and vanished. All at once I understood.

  They had crossed back to the Country of the Dead, where each would take a few steps and then cross back over to appear within the kitchens of those cottages containing infants. I stood, trembling. But there was nothing I could do. Soon the men had all reappeared outside, each carrying a sleeping child. One man carried two, twins born to some woman whose grief would shatter the dawn. The men took the children a short way down the road and then all four hisafs vanished. Gone to that other, larger circle on the other side, where the hapless Dead would be sitting around a spinning vortex.

  There was nothing I could do.

  The hisafs reappeared. They laid the babes in a circle in the road. After the men had once more disappeared, I crept towards the infants. All five lay as if among the Dead: quiescent, mindless, neither animated nor decaying. One lay wrapped in a yellow blanket woven with cheerful daisies, hours and days and weeks of loving work by some woman who cherished this child.

  ‘Don’t you understand, Roger?’ Mother Chilton had said to me. ‘Don’t you understand what Soulvine Moor is doing? When power flows along the threads of the web of being, when it is made to flow unnaturally from death back to life, there must also be a flow in the opposite direction. Or else the whole web will become more and more disturbed, until it is destroyed. There are terrible times coming, more terrible than you can imagine.’

  I was looking now at those times. When, on the other side, that circle of Dead had vanished into the vortex of watchers from Soulvine Moor, the life force of these babies had been drawn into the Country of the Dead to balance what had been taken by Soulvine Moor.

  A light came on in the closest cottage. A woman screamed. She had found an empty cradle.

  I sprinted for the shadowy trees, reaching them just as the first door was flung open and the first cottager tore out. In a few moments came the entire terrible scene I had witnessed twice before: distraught parents discovering their babies, cottagers running from door to door, wailing and shouting, the parents almost as mindless in their grief as the infants they cradled in their arms.

  To my intense relief, Rawnie, too, came running from the outlying cottage. ‘What is it? What happened?’

  No one had time to answer her. She stood, barefoot and dressed in a white nightshirt too big for her, staring at the closest of the babies. I didn’t know how much she understood, how much Charlotte had told her or she had overheard in her incessant eavesdropping. Expressions came and went on her freckled face: horror, curiosity, horror again. Did she realize that soon someone would cry out ‘Witchcraft!’ That all strangers would become suspect?

  I could not go to her. Not even when she turned and ran back inside the cottage. She didn’t understand, didn’t guess, had been too sheltered all her life by Charlotte and our father, who had never sheltered me—

  She ran out of the cottage, still in the nightdress but carrying her little pack, just as the first man cried, ‘Someone did this! A witch!’

  Rawnie ducked behind a stand of hollyhocks and rose bushes.

  Men shouted now, torn between grieving and organizing. The outrage built, the human need to find someone to blame, to avenge themselves on. Rawnie was just a little girl, would these men dare—

  Cat Starling had been but a girl, and a half-wit, when she had been burned as a witch.

  Rawnie was no half-wit. I watched as she moved stealthily away from the cottage, darting from the shadow of rose bushes to the deeper shadow of a willow, crouching behind the well house. The men still stood shouting at each other in the middle of the road. Another few minutes and one dashed towards that farthest cottage, but Rawnie had already gained the grove, appearing beside me in her white nightshirt, looking as insubstantial as marsh light on the Moor.

  ‘Come, Roger, why are you waiting stupidly like that? We must leave!’

  We ran through the woods, and the crashing attracted the men’s attention. ‘This way! Someone is there!’

  In the clearing there was no time for Rawnie to fasten the saddle on the startled horse. She slipped the reins from the tree where she had tethered him, climbed on with the aid of a low-hanging limb that nearly broke under her weight, and clattered away bareback. The woods were thin, and even as the men reached the clearing, she had guided the horse through the trees and onto a field of barley, where she whipped it into a gallop.

  I raced behind her. Another minute to reach the road at a point well beyond the village. The horse was fresh; they would never catch us. When Rawnie finally pulled the animal up to let it rest, just as the sun broke over the horizon, I saw her face. She was crying so hard she could barely see.

  ‘Stupid Roger! Why couldn’t you have warned me? Didn’t you guess they would blame that on me? That … that … whatever somebody did to those babies! Mama always said I must never do anything that anybody could think of as witchcraft, even stupid people – you’re the stupid people, Roger! You’re supposed to protect me! Oh, those poor babies … what happened to them? What? But you don’t know, you’re a stupid moor cur!’

  She went on like that for several minutes, taking out on me her fear and horror. I understood. And even if I had not, what could I have done about it?

  Finally she calmed enough to look around her. We were on a desolate section of road, here barely more than a cart track between distant villages, heading northwest. Rawnie didn’t know where we were, but I did. Two more days’ hard travel would carry us through The Queendom to the capital, Glory, on the broad and placid River Thymar.

  Would my body back in Galtryf last another two days? What if it died before I reached Mother Chilton?

  ‘This was a stupid idea,’ Rawnie said. ‘Nobody is going to give me an army to rescue Mama!’

  I swung my head from side to side: No.

  ‘You even agree with me!’ Rawnie cried, and I swung my head again, harder: No, I don’t! But my supposed disagreement had fired her up again. She needed to feel angry. It strengthened her.

  ‘Stupid Roger! They will give me an army – I’ll make them give it to me! Why are you always so disagreeable? I hate you!’ And she was gone, spurring the horse with her bare heels, her braids flying angrily behind her. All I could do was try to keep pace. And to keep hope.

  Travel all day, with a brief early stop to eat, the food stolen from the cottage of the night before and hidden in Rawnie’s pack. She changed from the nightshirt into her filthy dress and stout little boots. The horse looked strained, and she soothed it and rubbed it down and found sweet grass and water for it, but none of that helped much. Villages became closer together. We developed a rhythm: trot between villages, race through them before anyone could stop or question us. The summer weather was warm and sweet, and Rawnie looked with longing at children playing on village greens, girls drawing fresh water from cool wells, a farmer carrying an immense wheel of yellow cheese along the road to some neighbour or market. But she did not stop. That, too, I understood: if she stopped, despair might take her.

  By evening, however, the horse could go no further. I thought that Rawnie could not, either, despite her desperate bravery. She slid from the saddle and crumpled to the ground. ‘By damn!’ she said, somewhere between a sob and a snarl. ‘My stupid legs!’

  You’re unaccustomed to a full day of riding, I wanted to say, and could not. When I lay down beside her, she pushed me away. ‘Go! Who wants a stupid moor cur for company!’

  She did, despite what she said, but not just now. I stalked along the edge of the stream she had chosen to camp beside, and stared at the water. It reflected the rising moon, a long swath of silver on the dark water. An owl hooted in branches above. On the opposite bank a brown rabbit appeared,
twitching its nose, and I prepared to shift my mind and hunt.

  The rabbit became a woman dressed in a gown of rough brown wool.

  I blinked and peered, but I was not mistaken. A girl stood there, beckoning to me. One of the web women. So all this time we had been carrying a marker – what? It could have been anything, put into Rawnie’s pack by the mouse-woman. I should have thought of this earlier. If I had not been a moor cur, I would have cried from relief. Rawnie and I were not alone. Mother Chilton knew where we were, and what I was now.

  The reflection of the moon dissolved as I splashed across the shallow stream. The girl knelt to bring her face level with mine. No more than eighteen and very pretty, she gazed at me with neither a smile on her pink lips nor warmth in her dark eyes. ‘Roger, I am here from Mother Chilton.’

  My son? What of my son?

  ‘She – all of us – are astonished at what you have done.’ Her voice, however, held not astonishment but disapproval. ‘It was not thought possible that a hisaf could cross into a living being here, in the land of the living. You are untutored in the soul arts and should not have been able to do this.’

  What of my son?

  ‘I am sent to tell you that no other hisaf must see you like this. If the Brotherhood knew that what you have done is even possible ….’ She shuddered in the moonlight, and I wanted to bite her. More reproaches from yet another web woman, and all I wanted to know about was little Tom.

  ‘You understand that, don’t you?’ she went on. ‘If the Brotherhood begins crossing into animals here, we will surely lose this war. We are already losing it. Do you think you are some variety of hero, creating what could be yet another weapon for Soulvine Moor? And the number of children taken by the Brotherhood grows and grows, and we don’t understand how that can be without destroying the Country of the Dead, as you yourself once nearly destroyed it. Oh, why is everything so monstrous?’ she cried, and I realized she must be younger than eighteen. The cry was the wail of a terrified child. Had Mother Chilton’s forces become so depleted that she must enlist children?